Flashback

not sure of how to do it. He needed to tell the Old Man to bring as much money as he could—Val needed that $200 old bucks for the fake NICC—and then he needed a private place to do it.

To shoot my father, came the phrase from the more honest part of Val’s exhausted and overloaded mind.

His first plan had been to steal a phone, tell the Old Man to meet him with the money, take the money, and just shoot him here in the park. Nobody need know he’d ever been here.

Except… when Harold and Dottie had asked his name, he’d given it to them. He’d even mentioned Leonard by name. He’d done everything but give them his goddamned fingerprints.

So it would have to happen somewhere else.

“You look worn out, son,” said Harold. “These are both clean. Why don’t you lie down a spell there in the shade of the vestibule awning? It’s getting hot out here in the sun.”

The older man gave Val a pillow with a clean pillowcase—how could they keep things clean and ironed- looking living homeless out here in the park? Val wondered—and a thin, gray blanket.

“No, I’m good,” mumbled Val, but the shaded area in the grassy vestibule area just outside their oversized tent did look cool. He lay down for just a minute so he could think through what he had to do and what sequence he had to do it in. The breeze came up and he folded the blanket over himself.

Val awoke hours later—he had no watch but it seemed to be almost dusk—and cursed himself. He was such a fuck-up.

“I guess you were tired after all,” said Dottie, who had something heating up on the grill over their campfire. Whatever it was, it smelled good.

Val threw off the blanket. For a second upon awakening, he’d forgotten the pages of indictment in the colored folders he’d found hidden in his old man’s cubie—forgotten the fact that his father had conspired to have his mother killed. Any thought of hunger disappeared as that obscene revelation came back to him like black goo flowing out of a backed-up sewer pipe.

“Can I borrow your phone to make a call?” he asked the woman. “It’s a local call. I don’t have the money right now, but I’ll pay you back later.”

“Phooey on paying back,” laughed Dottie. “We all get a chance to pay back in different ways, to different folks. Here’s the phone, Val.”

He carried it fifty feet away until he could speak privately. For some reason he didn’t expect the Old Man to answer and was mentally preparing the message he was going to leave, so when he heard his father pick up and say his own name, Val panicked and clicked the phone shut.

He took a minute to regain his composure. Val realized how screwed up he was these days. The first thing he’d been tempted to shout when he heard the Old Man’s voice was, “You didn’t call me on my birthday!”

Stay frosty, Val my man, he told himself. Oddly, he heard the words being spoken in Billy Coyne’s mocking voice.

Val hit redial. But when he heard his father’s voice again, he began shouting and babbling—just telling the Old Man to come to this side of the park to pick him up—and it was only after he’d broken the connection that Val realized that he’d forgotten to tell Nick Bottom to bring at least $200 old bucks in cash.

All right… all right. You can’t do it here at the park anyway, so you get in the car and make him drive to an ATM and do it after he gets the cash out.

But do it where?

An hour. The Old Man had told him it would take him a fucking hour to come a few blocks to get him. Here he was, hurt and bleeding—or at least he would be if it hadn’t been for Harold and Dottie’s bandages and antiseptic and aspirin and hot meal—and the fucking Old Man couldn’t even bother to come to get him right away.

Maybe he knows it’s a trap. He must’ve seen all the grand jury stuff thrown around his cubie and Leonard’s probably told him how pissed I am.

And what was that the Old Man had said about Leonard having a heart attack? That didn’t make any sense. His grandfather had been fine when Val had left him a few hours earlier. The Old Man must be lying… but why that lie?

And if Leonard had suffered a heart attack—Val was pretty sure that the Old Man had said a sort of heart attack, whatever the fuck that meant—Val didn’t know what he could do about it. It was too bad, but Leonard was old. And Val had known for a while now that his grandfather had been hurting, some kind of chest pains, no matter how hard old Leonard had tried to hide it from him. Nobody lives forever.

Nothing I can do about it, thought Val. But he realized at once that if he killed his father, there’d be no one left to take care of Leonard. That Gunny G. character would almost certainly throw a dying old man out of that shitty mall-turned-cubies fortress, whether Leonard was dying or not.

Not my fucking problem, thought Val. That had been the shout-mantra of his—Billy Coyne’s, really—flashgang. Not… my… fucking… problem.

Dottie Davison wanted to feed him another meal, but Val gave the overly friendly old couple their phone back, thanked them awkwardly for the use of the pillow and blanket, and said he had to be going. He said his grandfather was going to pick him up down the street a ways.

Harold still tried to talk him into staying a while but Val shook his head, turned his back, and walked around the lake toward the trees and larger tent village of the homeless on the other side until he was out of sight of the old couple. He kept his hand on the butt of the Beretta in his belt.

He finally saw the rusty old G.M. gelding the Old Man had described. There’d been several beaters come driving through this west side of the park, but Val could tell by how slowly this one was going, and by the weird bullet holes in the hood—even with the low sunlight reflecting and making it impossible for Val to see through the windshield—that it had to be the Old Man. Hunting for him. Not knowing what was really waiting for him.

At the last minute, Val ducked behind some pine trees and let the car go slowly past.

Chickenshit!

But it wasn’t just fear, Val knew as he crouched behind the trees and waited for his Old Man to make another slow circuit of the park loop back to him.

He just wasn’t sure that he could get in the car and show the gun and force his father to take him to an ATM and all that crap and then do what he had to do. He hadn’t been able to talk to the Old Man on the phone, he hated him so much… how could he sit in a car with him for ten minutes?

Plus, the Old Man was a cop. Or had been before he became a hopeless flash addict. He used to be fast. The Old Man had seen people—punks—brandishing guns at him before and had handled the situation. The front seat of that piece-a-shit car would be a cramped space. A cop might know how to get a gun away from someone in the passenger seat without getting shot himself.

Val realized that he was losing his nerve.

Just shoot him. Just walk up to the car and shoot him. And fuck the money.

He realized that the whole thing about becoming a free trucker was bullshit. He didn’t even know how to drive a car. He’d never learn how to drive a truck with all its gears—just backing one of those rigs up with the trailer attached was a nightmare. And he’d never get $300,000 in new bucks to pay for that fake NICC. It was all bullshit.

Just shoot him. He murdered Mom. Walk up to the car when he comes back around and shoot him.

The old G.M. gelding rattled around the parkway loop north of the lake again and headed south toward Val and the homeless tent village.

Val pulled the Beretta from his belt, worked the slide to chamber a round, and held the weapon behind his back. He took five steps out of the pine trees to stand next to the road.

He could see the Old Man’s face this time and saw the jerk of his head as his father saw him. The car brake-